A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

488 tonogenesis
on the meaning intended, although the usual position for this is at or towards
the end of a sequence. Compare the different emphases in The woman was
walking to town with The woman was walking to town and The woman was
walking to town. The change in tonicity gives the sentence different implications
(e.g. ‘The woman, not the man, was walking . . .’), an important aspect of
communication in conversation, where it draws attention especially to the new
information in a sentence.
tonogenesis (n.) see tone (1)
tonology (n.) see tone (1)
top-down (adj.)
see bottom-up
topic (n.) (1) A term used in semantics and grammar as part of an alternative
binary characterization of sentence structure to that traditionally found in
the subject/predicate distinction; the opposite term is comment. The topic
of a sentence is the entity (person, thing, etc.) about which something is said,
whereas the further statement made about this entity is the comment. The
usefulness of the distinction is that it enables general statements to be made
about the relationships between sentences which the subject/predicate distinction
(along with other contrasts of this type) obscures. The topic often coincides
with the subject of a sentence (e.g. A visitor/ is coming to the door), but it need
not (e.g. There’s the driver/ who gave you a lift), and, even when it is a subject,
it need not come first in a sentence (e.g. John Smith my name is). It is sometimes
referred to as the ‘psychological subject’. Some languages mark the topic of a
sentence using particles (e.g. Japanese, Samoan). The topic/comment contrast
is, however, sometimes difficult to establish, owing to the effects of intonation
(which has a ‘competing’ information-signalling function), and in many
types of sentence the analysis is more problematic, such as in commands and
questions. Topicalization takes place when a constituent is moved to the
front of a sentence, so that it functions as topic, e.g. The answer I’ll give you in
a minute (see left dislocation).
(2) The phrase topic sentence is used in traditional studies of the structure of
paragraphs, to refer to the sentence which introduces the paragraph’s theme.
Linguistic investigation of this and related notions is in its early stages, but text
analysis of paragraphs indicates that the semantic and syntactic complexities
of paragraph structure are much greater than this simple judgement suggests.
topicalization (n.)
see topic
toponomastics, toponymy (n.)
see onomastics
total accountability A principle of linguistic analysis, introduced into structuralist
discussion in the 1940s, whereby everything that is stated at one
level of description is predictable from another. The principle is presented
with reference to the relationship between phonology and morphology: every
morph (and thus every phoneme) must be capable of being determined by the
morphemes and tagmemes of which an utterance is composed. Notions such